Firewall performance for the campus edge with the new XGS 7500 and XGS 8500

The Sophos XGS 7500 and XGS 8500 firewall appliances are engineered from the core to provide the performance needed to target larger enterprise and campus edge deployments.

Product highlights

• Broadens our addressable market to scale from the smallest SMB to the campus edge.
• Up to 47% higher throughput for all key protection vs. next highest model.
• Industry-leading ROI per protected Mbps comparable competitive models.
• Enterprise-grade acceleration with high performance Xstream Flow Processors and CPUs to meet the needs of the most demanding networks.
• High performance, high capacity with dual redundant Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) SSDs and a significant RAM increase over our other 2U models.
• High speed built-in connectivity with two QSFP28 ports on each model supporting ports speeds of up to 40 Gbps on the XGS 7500 and 100 Gbps on the XGS 8500.
• Up to 2x better power efficiency in combination with IPsec VPN than the industry average for comparable models.

Serving a broader firewall market

While Sophos is already an established firewall vendor for small and medium businesses and the distributed edge segment, with these new models, we’re extending our reach – and the opportunities for our channel partners – to address a broader market segment. This will allow us to go head-to-head with other incumbent firewall vendors to offer firewalls which scale from the smallest office up to large campus environments. Alongside our ecosystem of cloud-managed security products and services, including the threat hunting expertise which is at the heart of our highly successful Managed Detection and Response service, our firewalls are part of a very compelling story.

But obviously, the hardware is just half of the story. We’re continuously augmenting the features in Sophos Firewall OS (SFOS) to address the needs of a broader customer base and so extend our reach into larger environments. Having custom-built XGS Series appliances to address the performance and scalability needs of these customers allows them to fully benefit from our programmable Xstream architecture, with enterprise-grade acceleration at the hardware level, and a fully modular connectivity concept.

Why choose Sophos #1: Competitive performance

Here are just a few of the performance highlights based upon our datasheet numbers:

Why choose Sophos #2: Industry-leading return on investment (ROI)

You can have the fastest car in the world, but if it costs an absolute fortune to buy and consumes gallons of fuel, then it’s probably not a good investment. Network firewalls are a little different.

• Our new models offer an industry-leading Price Per Protected Megabit per second (PPPMbps) when compared with competitor models.
• In some cases, you would pay half the price per Mbps than our competitors.

Why choose Sophos #3: Energy efficiency

A badly designed enterprise firewall can have very high power consumption for a modest return in terms of performance. Our new models (and in fact all of our XGS Series models) provide energy efficiency which is significantly better than the industry average in this firewall category.

Watch out for further information on that topic in a future blog post.

Further information

Product support for the XGS 7500/8500 models is included in Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 MR1. The release also includes support for the new 5G module for our desktop appliances.

• SFOS 19.5 MR1 Community post and release notes

Check our website using the links below for further information or to download our firewall brochure.

• Sophos.com/Firewall
• Sophos.com/Compare-XGS
• Firewall Enterprise Protection

Please do not hesitate to reach out to your local Sophos representative to learn more.